Synopsis:

An extraordinary novel, haunted by a sense that the living and the dead are separated by no more than a narrow and disputed borderland. These tales are now recognised as among the most remarkable explorations of the supernatural to appear in Victorian times.

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Synopsis:
Engaged to a decent but unexceptional man, Isbel Lomont leads an empty life, moving with her aunt from hotel to hotel. She is perverse and prickly with untapped resources of character and sensibility. They explore by chance a strange house and there Isbel meets Judge, its owner; a profoundly disturbing relationship develops and it is from this that the drama unfolds.
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Synopsis:

Set in Rome during Nero’s reign of terror, this is a disciplined historical novel tracing the destruction of one cell of the early church, thorough in its historical interpretation and in its determination to make the past accessible and readable.

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Synopsis:

Morrisson tells the anguished story of the three daughters of a minister and his wife living in a remote Highland manse. The youngest narrates the love affairs of her sisters, each of whom falls in love with a man deemed an unacceptable match by their patriarchal, rigid and prejudiced society.

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Synopsis:

Caught in the melting pot of social injustice, revolution, war and pacifism, this powerful book gives a vivid account of the experiences and struggles of a Glasgow family from the First World War and into the Depression at the end of the Twenties.

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Synopsis:

Out of the war years comes this memoir of life as a wife and mother in occupied France during World War II. Candid and poignant, du Cros powerfully evokes the international political atmosphere of the time and its effects within her own family.

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Synopsis:

Set amidst the urban decay of Lanarkshire, Robin Jenkins has created a modern-day Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Convinced of his own rectitude, Duffy declares war on society. Ridiculous, yet horrifying at the same time, his campaign builds to a terrifying conclusion.

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Synopsis:

When a storm in wrecked on a rocky Highland coast in a wild night, Charlie MacIan drags a drowning seaman out of the pounding waves. The seaman is clinging to a wooden chest. Brought into shelter, he is found to be dead – but was his death accidental? And did the chest once contain money?

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Synopsis:

Jacob's fifth and finest novel is a tragic drama of the 1745 Jacobite Rising: tightly written, poetic in its symbolic intensity, lit by flashes of humour and informed by the author's own family history as one of the Erskines of the House of Dun near Montrose.

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Synopsis:

This volume collects three of the very best works by James Kennaway: Tunes of Glory - a grippingly dramatic exploration of the glamour and brutality of post-war army life; Household Ghosts - a claustrophobic tale of family tension, love triangles and the persistence of the past; and Silence, which tells of the accidental meeting and the complex union between a white man and a black woman in times of racial tension and sexual violence.

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Synopsis:

This collection of stories presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

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Synopsis:

A stylish and enthralling thriller set in 1978, which explores America's influence on Europe and the causes of terrorism.

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Synopsis:

Opening at the turn of the century in the extreme poverty of the Rhinns of Galloway, this thinly disguised autobiographical tale, narrates the journey of Jean Ramsay, an aggressively practical woman from a peasant background, and her weak-willed, poetic husband, David.

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Synopsis:
The Three Estaitis was first performed in the mid-sixteenth century to an audience of royalty and commoners alike. With its high style and penetrating political satire, it pressed for reform in Church and State and even in kingship itself with a hilarious masque of vice and corruption in high places.
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Synopsis:

This hilarious novel charts the rise and fall (and perhaps the rise again) of Magnus Merriman – would-be lover, writer, politician, idealist and crofter – moved by dreams of greatness and a talent for farcical defeat.

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Synopsis:

James Hogg’s masterpiece is a brilliant portrayal of the power of evil. Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, the novel recounts the corruption of a boy of strict Calvinist upbringing by a mysterious stranger under whose influence he commits a series of murders.

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Synopsis:

Angelo, a private in Mussolini’s ‘ever-glorious’ Italian army, may possess the virtues of love and an engaging innocence, but he lacks the gift of courage. However, due to circumstances beyond his control, he ends up fighting not only for Italy, but also for the British and German armies...

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Synopsis:

Galt’s two great political novels date from around the passing of the Reform Act of 1832. The Member has claims to be the first political novel in the English language and is a tour de force of wit, observation, and a devastating critique of political self-seekings. The Radical is a study of narrow-minded, humourless fanaticism.

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Synopsis:

The distillation of Carswell's thoughts on her own life and indeed on the nature of identity and autobiography itself.

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Synopsis:

At one and the same time an account of a personal spiritual crisis and a hilarious spoof on academic learning, early Victorian values and materialism, a radically deconstructive vision reveals the very highest symbols of belief as just that – merely symbols. How to believe in anything after such an insight is the question asked in Carlyle's masterpiece of invention, parody and profound laughter.

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Synopsis:

Etienne de Balafré, half French, half English and raised in South Africa, returns to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father. Was Lucien de Balafré a patriot who served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government?

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Synopsis:

A story of love and awakening, Breeta's people are the ancient, newly Christianized Pictish tribes living in Northern Scotland in the 9th century. Assailed by the pagan Vikings from across the sea, the clash of old and new is a conflict from which the Scottish nation is forged.

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Synopsis:

Regarded as Hogg's most ambitious work of fiction, this tale is an extraordinary combination of the fantastic, the funny, the serious and the historically realistic. Ranging from Galloway to Northumberland, the main focus of the story is to be found in the Scottish Borders.

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Synopsis:

This is the fourth collection of adventure tales by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Canongate Classics series. The book includes: "The House of Eld", "The Song of Morrow", "Will O' the Mill", "The Treasure of Franchard", "The Sire de Maletroit's Door", "Treasure Island" and "The Black Arrow".

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Synopsis:

Opening with a premonition of death, this is the story of a young man's conflict with the spiritual authority of his father, of a spirit of scepticism set against an authoritarian Calvinism.

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